


In the Land of Twilight Under the Moon

by The_Exile



Category: Mother 2: Gyiyg no Gyakushuu | EarthBound, Mother 3
Genre: Gen, Mild Language, Spoilers, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-06-29
Packaged: 2019-05-30 08:56:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 548
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15093422
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/The_Exile/pseuds/The_Exile
Summary: Moonside was never just an illusion.





	In the Land of Twilight Under the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> written for the Story Works solstice challenge
> 
> theme included sharp contrasts, opposites or two sides of a coin, so I thought of Fourside and Moonside

He had done it. He had finally proven that the phenomenon known as 'Moonside' was more than just a set of projected holograms. With the help of his son and the Apple Kid and the Mister Saturns, of course, but it had been his idea so he was getting the credit and how the hell would two kids and a small tribe of aliens collect the royalties anyway, so that was that.

He had started by eliminating all the other obvious possibilities. It was clearly too physically present to just be a hologram. It even reacted too naturally to be one of the physical light holograms they were developing now. He considered psychic holograms, ones that projected hallucinations directly into the brain, including nerve signals that simulated physical contact with the hallucinations. If it was a psychic construct, it was very sophisticated, capable of making lasting memories of the hallucinated objects for weeks after all contact had been lost with the original source, even passing on the subliminal suggestions to others.

In other words, if he decided this was still an illusion, he couldn't prove anything in the world around him ever hadn't been an illusion. This was fine by him - it wasn't like he could get any crazier - but the committee he wanted funding from would need something less philosophical and more tangible out of his costly research.

Psychic activity had been detected, mind you, far more powerful than the usual residue the machines got from practically anything alive. In fact, the exact patterns he was getting from this strong psychic reading didn't resemble anything on Earth. He had only found its like before in captured Starman technology. Starmen themselves were almost entirely mechanical, interfacing directly with their weapons and vehicles, so how they could use such strong psychic techniques had always been beyond him. Then again, so much was. Giygas, for instance, the completely insane, constantly hungry sentient snarl of raw psychic energy, so much energy that it was overloading the dimension it had managed to just about exist in by violating the laws of time and space.

And then there was the thing Paula had contacted...

But anyway, further research taught him that Moonside was somewhere in between reality and illusion, a stable, coherent, self-sustainable pocket dimension of a kind usually created by the Starmen as living quarters but this one had been stolen and modified by Pokey to imprison people within a surreal, sinister version of Fourside. 

Upon reflection, that was probably one of the earliest of the experiments that Pokey would use as a precursor to the sort of atrocities he committed on Nowhere Island. Back then, the Professor knew that the twisted boy was loose somewhere in the Universe but had no idea how much havoc he was planning to cause. Andonuts had instead focussed on the potential uses of the new technology for the betterment of all humanity. His suspicion was proven correct - that Moonside was effectively an organised, artificial version of the phenomenon Ness called 'Magicant', and could be reproduced by a chorus of powerful enough psychics whose powers were amplified by reverse engineered Starman technology. Possible uses included an emergency shelter in case of a global disaster, a backup Earth, as it were.

They codenamed it 'Project Nowhere Island'.


End file.
